How I ended up running a card show calendar in Hawaii.

In 2020 I was on a path I thought would last my whole life.

I was working in international education — designing study abroad programs for students. The mission felt important, even urgent: send people across borders, build cross-cultural relationships, nurture the next generation of leaders who actually knew each other. The world felt fragile and disconnected, and the answer felt obvious. Get people out of their bubbles. Get them face-to-face with people whose lives looked nothing like their own. I'd just been accepted into a master's program in the field. I figured this was the career.

Then COVID hit.

International ed didn't slow down. It fell off a cliff. Nobody was traveling. Programs froze. Universities pulled funding. My wife and I started talking seriously about moving back to where she's from — Hawaii. The future I'd planned suddenly didn't fit the world we were living in. Building a career around shipping students across continents wasn't going to work when shipping anyone across anything had stopped.

So I did what a lot of people did during that strange in-between period. I started looking sideways.

Finding community where I didn't expect it

Around the same time, I was tinkering with digital collectibles. I was mostly curious — the whole space was loud and weird and a little embarrassing to admit interest in. But I kept showing up in Discord servers attached to projects I liked, and I started noticing something I really wasn't expecting.

People from the Philippines, the US, Germany, China, Brazil, Vietnam — they were forming real communities around shared interests. Late-night calls. Joint projects. Inside jokes that lived for months. People showing up for each other across time zones in ways that felt, honestly, more real than a lot of the in-person communities I'd been a part of.

Strangers from opposite sides of the planet were becoming actual friends. Without funding, without bureaucracy, without an institution mediating it. Just because they cared about the same things.

That shook something loose for me.

If the goal was cross-cultural relationships, the format wasn't the only way to get there. Maybe wasn't even the best way anymore.

So I followed the thread.

Five years building things across borders

What started as curiosity became a career. I went on to help a Malaysian/Australian founder build a community and launch a discovery platform. I helped create a gaming distribution platform. I was recruited by a triple-A game studio to help launch a title pioneering new tech in an established space. Then I worked with a Philippines-based team innovating at the intersection of AI and crypto.

It was an incredible run. I learned more about how communities actually form — how trust builds, how stories spread, how products live or die based on whether real people show up for them — than I ever would have in a classroom.

But somewhere around year four, as the world started reopening and the shockwave from COVID started to dissipate, I started noticing something else.

What the digital era couldn't replace

People were tired.

Not tired of the internet. Tired of only having the internet.

Five years of Discord calls and group chats and livestreams and remote meetings had been an extraordinary substitute, but it had not been a replacement. The thing that screen-mediated community could never fully give people was the same thing the international ed programs were ultimately about: standing in a room next to someone, looking at them in the eyes, and being part of the same moment.

Real, in-person, walk-up-and-shake-a-stranger's-hand contact. The kind you can't fake with a webcam.

I wasn't sure what to do with that observation. I just sat with it.

An accidental Saturday morning

The next chapter happened almost by accident.

I was getting into golf. A friend invited me to play a round at a course on Oahu, and that same morning at the same course there happened to be a card show. I figured I'd swing by before the round started. I went with him and his two daughters and immediately got hooked.

I hadn't seen that many people gathered in person around a shared hobby in years. Kids. Uncles. Aunties. Pros. Locals and visitors. People who'd never met talking like they'd known each other forever, all because they were looking at the same little piece of cardboard.

The energy was electric. Not nostalgic — present. This wasn't a relic from a previous decade. This was a community that had been quietly building the whole time the internet had been telling itself it had replaced everything.

I spent the next two months going deep.

I visited every card shop on the island. Made friends with shop owners. A vendor friend invited me to set up at a show — that pulled me in even further. I started to see the patterns: which shows had the right energy, which organizers really cared about their community, which shops were quietly anchoring entire neighborhoods of collectors.

Then I noticed the problem.

The problem nobody had solved

Finding card shows in Hawaii was nearly impossible.

I had to reactivate Instagram just to find them. I was answering "when's the next card show?" in Facebook group chats every week. On a trip to Detroit, I tried to scope the mainland scene and it was even worse — one of the best shows I found there had no website, no Instagram page, no flyer online. A vendor from out of state had taken a photo of a printed flyer and posted it to a group chat. That was how you found out.

This was a community generating massive in-person attendance, real economic activity, real friendships — and the discoverability layer was effectively missing.

It struck me as the exact mirror image of what I'd just spent five years building. In web3 and gaming, I'd been helping projects with global digital communities solve for physical presence — meetups, conventions, IRL events. Here was a community that already had the physical presence solved at a level most digital-native projects would kill for. But the digital layer that should have been amplifying it was almost nonexistent.

I figured I'd try to fix that.

What started as a rolodex

I'm not technical. But I've spent enough time in product QA and product marketing over the years to know what a polished product feels like — and AI has leveled up enough in the last 18 months that the gap between "I have an idea" and "I have a working website" has collapsed in ways most people haven't really sat with yet.

What started as a single session trying to organize my own card-show contacts turned into a two-week build of a real community platform.

Hawaii Card Shows is the result. The free community calendar for trading card events across the Hawaiian Islands. Every show, every trade night, every shop on every major island, in one place.

It's free to use. Free to list. Built by collectors, for collectors. Submitted by the community, maintained by me and a small group of organizers and shop owners I trust.

Where we are two and a half months in

I launched it quietly in early April 2026. No paid marketing. No press releases. No paid acquisition of any kind. Just submitting it to a few SEO directories, posting it in a handful of local group chats, and letting the community find it organically.

And those numbers don't fully capture it. A festival weekend in early June — Keep It Aloha at SALT Kaka'ako on Friday, West Side Cardshow at the Kroc Center on Saturday and Sunday — drew over 14,000 combined attendees across the two shows. UFC champion Max Holloway showed up to vend his own personal collection at the West Side show. Real people, real gathering, in real life.

What this is really about

The thing I was chasing in 2020 — communities that genuinely connect people across difference — was right there the whole time. It just didn't look like a classroom in Spain. It looked like a folding table in a Kaka'ako warehouse with a 60-year-old retired teacher and a 12-year-old kid arguing over a Charizard.

If I've learned one thing across this whole arc — from study abroad to Discord servers to building products with founders in Kuala Lumpur and Manila to standing in a parking lot watching strangers become friends over trading cards — it's this:

Communities are not built by content. They are built by gathering.

Digital tools should make gathering easier. They should not try to replace it.

That's what Hawaii Card Shows is. A digital tool that exists to make the in-person gatherings easier to find.

What's next

I'll keep building. More recap content. More tools for organizers. Some collaborations with shops and creators that I'm pretty excited about. The newsletter is becoming its own thing, and the mainland audience is starting to ask about visiting.

If you're in the trading card space, building community, or working at the intersection of digital tools and in-person experiences — I'd love to connect on LinkedIn or reach me at [email protected].

And if you're in Hawaii, come find me at a show. 🤙